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This essay introduces the four volumes of the contemporary Voyage pittoresque, establishing their multiple relations with the work of the same name, published by the Abbé Saint-Non in 1781-1786 and the extraordinary graphic repertoire produced by the artists sent by the Abbé to the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. The first part of this essay focuses on the protagonists of the eighteenth century expedition and on the character of their activity in the light of recent graphic and documentary discoveries. The second part of the essay analyses each contemporary volume as an integral part of the larger work, directly connected to the 2015 conference dedicated to the critical overview of the sites of Southern Italy featured in the Voyage of Saint-Non. The first two volumes of the present publication are made up of a collective series of essays that develop the conclusions of the conference, regarding, respectively, the sections dedicated to the separate geographic regions and the final round table discussions. The following two volumes, of monographic character, are dedicated to Calabria. The region, which thanks to the iconography fixed by the artists of Saint-Non appeared for the first time in the European Grand Tour imaginary. The third volume offers a chronological examination of the region before and after Saint-Non’s publication, while the fourth volume systematically analyse the context of the sites which were represented by Saint-Non’s artists.

Examination of the view from the Saint-non expedition named «View of the rocks and Bova seashore nearby Capo Spartivento with Mt. Etna in the background» and its current photographic context, which represents a diachronic comparison among iconographical sources of different periods, is implemented with the aim to understand the evolutionary nature of this specific territorial context but, more in general, to make us to deal with landscape as a complicated notion. Landscape is an ambiguous word as a definition as well as a function. Therefore, another aim emerges, no less important; to offer a framework of incisive considerations relevant to a more general structural transformation concerning the essence of landscape and its related culture which, since its appearance in the 16th century, drives it to its formal conceptualisation in the 19th century, and from that moment to its current structure. The examined process of metamorphosis sees the transformation of landscape from a cornerstone element of an aesthetic – literary visio, (therefore only contemplative), to a scientific-functional one oriented to inspect and manage reality.

Beyond its apparent compactness, the book authored by Saint-Non hides a complex plot: under the meticulous and tenacious direction of the French inventor and financier, it represents a collecting work, embodying multiple intellectual contributions, being generally non-homogeneous neither from a cultural nor from an artistic point of view. Also in relation to Campania, whose literature and iconography play a fundamental role in the book, it shows a decidedly ambiguous shape: while on the one hand it shows totally new “discoveries”, offering definitely and decidedly unpublished glimpses in literary and visual terms, at the same time it rehashes ideas, notes and even some ‘prejudices’ of others, retrieving second hand images and notations. While the text intends to assume the literary form of a travel diary in all its immediacy, or of an account “in direct contact” with the places travelled and narrated, at times it takes on the shape of a compendium of learned knowledge.

The result of a revision process on the part of the publisher of Voyage Picturesque, regarding the original drawings and texts produced by participants of the expedition, is a collection of views of cities, landscapes and architecture of Calabria, which were prepared during the expedition organized in 1778 by the Abbot of Saint-Non and led by Dominique Vivant- Denon. A comparison of the Voyage with the original travel diary of Vivant-Denon, published in another edition, and with a series of sketches and preparatory drawings by Louis-Jean Desprez and Claude-Louis Châtelet, offers the opportunity to verify how those unexplored and largely unknown places were perceived and then interpreted, through the filter of the "brave" travelers who crossed Calabria at the end of the 18th century and, eventually, to also verify how those same places are still recognizable in their original structures.

The evocative presence of the term pittoresque in the frontispiece of the Voyage would seem to explain the whole reason for the “expedition” of artists sent by Saint-Non to the South of Italy; However, at the same time, we feel the need to accompany and soften the weight of that term by adding the specification, ou description – taken as almost synonymous with pittoresque – as if to clarify that the work does not contain a predominance of graphic and descriptive expressions exclusively anchored to those aesthetic values already for some time “codified”. We have to immerse ourselves in reading the Journal ou Nottece (sic) on a Voyage fait en Italie 1759-1760 written by Saint-Non to discover the profound meaning he attributed to this term, using it with extreme parsimony, in comparison to other terms used a lot more frequently.